Spine
by twentyfiveraven
Summary: Matt does it like he does everything else: enduring, feet on the ground and heart in his hand, eyes always, always hidden. Lots of non-explicit underaged sex, Mello/Others, Matt/Others, Mello/Himself, Matt/Himself, Matt/Mello


Something changes.

Matt isn't sure exactly when, but he's not stupid. He's just third, and without some sort of mental impurity—inferiority/superiority complex or just reclusiveness—that's all he'll ever hope to be. Although third is still a pedestal, still a plateau from which to observe everyone else milling down below. Say what they might, the other orphans had yet to look him in the eye without wariness or outright dislike, and they proved themselves wrong every time they did. Matt, of course, wasn't concerned with other people. But he did recognize collective hypocrisy when he saw it, and was quick to label it all some sort of sick joke and leave it at that. The most he did was smirk, knowingly, and then turn his head back down toward the ground so they couldn't see.

Something changes.

It's funny how even though they both have photographic memories they can't identify exactly when it happened. Matt chalks it up (underneath "the inherent stupidity of the human race") as Omnipotent Sick Joke #4,592 and goes on quietly with his life. As best he can, now that everything has changed. Matt does it like he does everything else—enduring, feet on the ground and heart in his hand, eyes always, always hidden.

If he had to pick an instance (although it would as much sense as trying to pick apart the Gordian knot), he would probably identify it as the time when he was hurled unceremoniously into a closet and had to endure the sounds of Mello losing his V-card to Lucinda for the next hour or so. He seemed to recall a lot of darkness and stifling many disbelieving chokes at the wondrous acoustics of Mello's closet as every moan, grunt, and sigh found its way, perfectly intact, to Matt's ears. He could register the changes in pitch, and even the slight musical tenor of Mello chanting "Lu, Lu", his voice rising and falling innumerable octaves. (He had thought, wildly, that Mello should join the orphanage choir, it was a field Near wouldn't touch, at least.) Sticking his fingers in his ears did nothing, so he resigned himself to the unexpected soundtrack and jerked off in tandem, coming with a groan muffled in the elbow of his shirt all over a towering pile of Mello's dirty laundry.

Beyond that, he didn't remember much.

If he left it up to Mello, well, the other would probably cite a different incident entirely.

Figures.

It would probably be when Matt moved into his room, one March noon, and the sky had been that sort of translucent wax color that gives Mello headaches when he looks at it. It must have confused him, to enter his dorm after Advanced Forensics and finding Matt curled up on the floor, yanking the game controller in apparent correspondence to whatever was going on in Tekken 4. Of course, Mello would never have admitted to being confused. He never asked, not even when Matt had silently crawled into a crumpled sleeping bag opposite the television at lights out, comfortably out of the way of the door and uncomfortably directly in Mello's line of sight. But Mello didn't ask, because that would be admitting to something he didn't know, and he couldn't do that. Eventually he convinced himself into believing that he "let" Matt stay in his room, forgetting any and all thoughts of the other's capriciousness, and that he had the power to throw him out at any time. Which he doesn't.

Mello insists there's nothing to tell.

No one asks, either, really.

It gets worse day by day. Not everyone can tell, either. It's not something they want to make known, so they hide it in plain sight where only the most intuitive can identify it for what it is—whatever it is. Linda's mouth thins--or it flaps like a shuttered window, it depends--whenever she sees them together, always about to say something and lacking the words and fortitude to say it. Baggy old Roger the Codger frowns, bagging and olding. Beyond sniggers, turns away. L says nothing, aloof, observing. Near, surprisingly, says the most, watching, somewhere between discretion and curiosity, perhaps waiting for the opportune moment, or just simply as perplexed as they are. This drives Mello up the wall and onto the ceiling, shaking chandeliers inside their sockets, until Matt can calm him down.

These days, all he needs to do is look at him.

They are close to the breaking point. Beyond starts to tease them with his eyes, staring at the space between them as if it contained a person, or a puppet that he might tempt to dance upon its strings. It makes them both uneasy, and they avoid him, avoid each other, consequently making them even more uneasy. Matt keeps dropping his GameBoy. Mello litters the floor of their room with broken halves of pencils. And it's too easy to blame on Beyond. They both know that.

It takes Matt an age, but he finally, eventually just _gets_ it.

It happens at night.

Matt wakes like he never does, fully aware, for the first time without that deep ancestral half-consciousness that so signifies humanity, before any thoughts pass through the brain, before any soul readies itself to face the day. He feels strangely incomplete without it, as if some piece of his essence was stolen while he slept.

He blinks, and the first thing he sees is a white arrow, shooting across two walls of Mello's room, and then coming back again. He watches. It shoots itself, and comes back again. There is no bow.

He blinks again, his eyes adjusting fully this time.

The first thing he sees is Mello's arm, held up as high as it can, black red rosary beads woven through his fingers. The silver cross swings back and forth, back and forth. The white is its reflection from the moonlight, stretching a celestial eyelash through the window. Mello touches the cross with a finger, spinning it like a plaything. The arrow changes into a bullet, ricocheting off all four walls of the room.

Mello hasn't worn a nightshirt since Near started wearing his pajamas to class. His bare arms look absurdly pale. The rest of his body lies in shadow; only his arms are visible in the cool wash of moonlight, one lone white serpent, dangling its holy prey. And his hand, his one finger, rapping the Savior upon his small silver ankles, turning him into a pendulum, never at exact intervals.

Arrows. Bullets. The bi-fold curve of Mello's arm, pinched in at the elbow, white except where the shadows fall, and then they are blue. It's as strange as any modern work of art, curiously absent of modernity. Matt watches, feeling antediluvian and underwater.

Mello sits up.

His nose pierces the moonlight first, breaking the mirror smooth surface of this alien ocean. Followed by the smooth pallet of his face, vase curve profile, molded deftly and perfect, but for the too-long curve of his eyelashes, a chisel knifed into cheekbone to reveal an abrupt apostrophe of black. His hair swings on either side of his chin, vexatious as ever.

The sheet slips down the side of his small chest with a whisper, unremarkable marble curves now tattooed with the striped shadows of the mullioned windows.

He brings the rosary closer to him, staring, lightly thumbing the beads without counting, holding it in his hands as if it were a conscious being, as if it could answer questions he wouldn't dare himself to ask.

Matt watches, wondering if the silver in his eye is moonlight's due or the reflection from the crucifix in his hand.

Mello inhales sharply, his shoulders rising and falling under the weight of the moon.

Matt watches, wondering at the slices of blue marking his spine and the dimpled wingspan of his shoulder blades.

Mello never exhales.

He tightens a length of the dark red beads between his hands and loops it over his head, mouth opening to take the rosary beads taut underneath his teeth. His arm slithers stealthily beneath the sheet, the other tucking itself into a point, his hand across his eyes as if attempting to blind himself to the horror of what he's doing.

Matt suddenly realizes he can't stop watching.

He cools his burning face in the pillow, trying to erase the realization, but it's no use. He ends up turning back to the sight no matter what he tries, Mello half arched back into darkness, restless limbs stirring beneath his sheets, his inhalations and exhalations expertly quieted to inaudible huffs of breath. Sometimes, there is the faint clink of metal against teeth, or the hollow rattle of beads. Matt can still see where the sheet exposes him, a U shape of bunched up fabric revealing his bare, pale chest, the dark elliptical smudge of his nipple revealing how his whole body moves, so deceptively, so cleverly quiet.

If Matt tries, he might be able to see Mello's face, his mouth stretched into a lopsided grin with the rosary pulling his lips back; frustration, perhaps, or anger furrowing his brow…or maybe the skin there is smooth, assured of penitence…were his eyes closed, or did those long lashes hood his silver blue irises only halfway?

Matt feels his pupils dilate, halting a gasp and forcing them shut.

Of course, it explains everything, every _awful_ little thing.

Matt is so preoccupied with moving his sleeping bag out of Mello's room he doesn't even notice Beyond until he hears him chuckling knowingly, clutching Near's legs in his skeletal hands, the young pallid boy surveying the whole scene critically over the other's messy black hair.

He drags it back in twenty minutes later, cursing them both mentally.

Things change again, sickeningly fast, autumn bringing along a morbid sense of mutation along with winter's chill.

Matt loses his virginity, quickly and definitely not quietly, to Lex, laying her out in the reddish sand of the playground, cold dirt stuck inside his pants. He never thought sex would be so much work. Lex, an active and eager to please slut with ribbons in her hair, tucks her glasses into the hem of her skirt as she sucks him off. He has the common courtesy not to come in her mouth.

Mello doesn't say a word. Matt doesn't either, even when Lex ran from her room one night shrieking like some unearthly banshee about snakes in her bed. He did, however, laugh uproariously, and avoided everyone's eye.

Matt catches him with Siobhan, going back to their room for a paper he'd forgotten. Mello had learned to tone it down, much to Matt's chagrin. He went back to class without his paper.

Figures.

Inevitably, the funny ha-has die out sometime around October, transubstantiating from boys' games into something wholly unknown, three degrees away from insanity, Matt is sure of it.

The staring is the worst. Well, second only to the oral fixation they were both developing. Mello takes it out on his chocolate bars. Toffee almond, dark hazelnut, nougat, caramel—his addiction gets worse every day. They become his trademark. Matt had formerly regarded them with morbid fascination, bordering on outright disgust, and then just ignored them, but now it had changed.

Mello laps at the really thick bars, worrying them with his teeth, licking the smooth underside with the broad expanse of his tongue, digging his teeth into the ridged squares on the top, scraping away the shavings with a rapid shift of his tongue, in and out between his lips, repeating the motions until he gets too tired and resorts to mouthing the corners whenever he feels like it.

Matt gives up. He gets off to the image helplessly, coming so hard it surprised and repulsed him, making him retch with self-hatred.

He himself goes through packets of pens and lollipops, but dares not hope for reciprocation.

But it's the staring that really gets to them.

They are fish.

In Matt's case, the goggles help some, but most of the time Mello still _feels _it. Sometimes Matt stares without meaning to, a lot of the time when Mello was doing something besides working or looking angry. When he rests his cheek on his hand and stares out of wide windows. When he dozes with his forehead pressed to pages of crowded ink letters. When he forgets who he is, even just for a minute, and lets it all go.

Mello returns every gaze with one of his own. Long looks, frightening Matt almost as much as when he catches himself staring at Mello. One time he hooked his finger under the bridge of Matt's goggles and pulled them right up over his head, his face close enough to touch.

Mello is scary because he wants something. He doesn't know what—thank God—but he knows he wants something, and he can't have it.

(Yet another thing Mello can't have. It makes him angry, makes him scary, makes him look across the room at his friend and think things, terrible things, makes him throw his rosary at the wall and scream about what should be his.)

Matt starts to get sick.

His self-deception, his intelligence, his privately coveted status as third, and the only friendship he ever truly valued—it was all starting to change. The nurse keeps saying it's stress; she advises him to take it easy for a little while, tells him nothing is worth his health.

But she doesn't know, no one knows, the strange creature Matt nurses in his chest, the one that purrs in contentment whenever he feels the shards of Mello's blue eyes pick him apart angle by angle.

Fucking figures.

He gets into a fight with him—a wrestling match, like when they were kids—and he pulls Mello's hair, kicking his shins, hollering, almost beginning to foster some juvenile notion of hope and mistakes. Mello laughs and punches and elbows, tussling, throwing himself at Matt's side and biting his ear. Mello's body weight doesn't knock him down, just jostling him a bit, but the shock of Mello's unmerciful teeth around the cartilage of his ear makes him cry out with an almost catlike sound. Mello pushes him over, on to his knees, scraping with his teeth.

Matt readies himself to fight back with own teeth, but then he hears a rasping sound, a hiss of breath, louder than it would have been, and feels Mello's arms turn from locks to laces, holding him tighter and somehow softer than he ever should have done.

Matt _freezes._

Mello starts…pulling inward with his mouth, gnawing a little, sucking the skin inside his mouth and then pushing it back out.

Everything in Matt tenses up, the clockwork connecting his limbs to his joints suddenly over-wound. Everything bends in, inward, knees, feet, wrists, elbows, and when he can't possibly tense any more he starts to shake.

Mello releases his teeth, mouthing now, tonguing; licking the sensitive whorls with what Matt could only call a keen interest. He was curving his body over and around, pressed to every inch of him.

Matt couldn't stop shaking. He could hear everything, the tiniest ministration of Mello's mouth amplified, everything sounding sticky and wet and warm—silky—hot—rushing blood and breath.

He lets go, nuzzling the tip of his nose to the top of his ear, pursing his lips together in small, dry kisses to the soft skin and fine hair behind it.

Matt bolts.

Mello finds him fifteen minutes later, in the closet of his old room, countenance scarlet, flushed stupid with adolescent libido and humiliation, hand thrust down his pants and working at his erection without pause.

Mello takes a deep breath, always first to take the plunge. Matt remembers his breath in quicksilver cobalt midnight, soundless but for the shifting clicks of dark red beads. He just now realizes the absence of the rosary, watching Mello shed his shirt, kicking the pants off his ankles.

He sits down on the edge of Matt's bed, daring.

Matt follows, slower, clumsier, fumbling with his belt and adjusting his goggles anxiously. But what matters is that he joins him, over him, pulling awkwardly at his legs and holding himself balanced on his own hands, face flushed and eager for the boy beneath him, mouth full of him, eyes full of him, closer than he had ever been.

Mello loses himself in his own animal, but Matt's conscious of it. He knows this is conceived partly from some hot wild concoction of pheromones and partly from genuine, relentless attraction. He knows that only half of this is real, in a sense. That the other half is just like the playground, with Lex, or by himself in Mello's closet, only different because he was with another humanoid with a Y chromosome.

But the other half, the real half, the half that mattered, made this different not because he was with another boy, but because he was with Mello.

He just can't tell the difference.

It's fevered and wild and almost painfully inexperienced, as if they were virgins. And even though that day on the playground brought him to an embarrassing climax that's what it _feels _like. Every other time just seems wrong, contrived, forged masterpieces, wastes of effort with only fake satisfaction gleaned in the end. But this is _bare._

It happens like playing, at first, little yelps and squeals and teeth, nipping and pawing and rolling around each other like wolf cubs. And somewhere they cross a line and really, they both need to keep track of things but Matt suddenly doesn't care because everything, everything is exposed for him to see and touch and lose himself in, every little bit of him alive and pulsing, at once apart and part of the whole.

It's the heat that does them in, he knows that much, at least. Mello comes from contact alone, sheer physicality, Matt's thighs and erection brushing against his cock, with a short barking moan he tries to stifle in Matt's throat. And Matt comes with a blatant rush of heat and dangerous, burgeoning hormones and the few swipes of knowledge (like Mello's tongue inside his mouth) that tells his body, that _he_, _himself_, _alone _made Mello come without even really _fucking_ him.

And somehow the knowledge, and the feeling it reveals, something acidic and hot and exhilarating that makes his face flush, strikes him as also very, very dangerous.

And Mello, wrapped around him, murmuring soft and greedy and fogging the lenses of his goggles with his light panting breaths, is probably the most dangerous thing of all.

Matt holds onto this last thought briefly, like a ribbon woven between his fingers or a chocolate truffle melting in his concave palm, before he places it on his tongue and gives it to Mello.

Mello, he knows, won't mind at all.

* * *

**A/N: **So, um, I've been attempting to write Mello/Matt underage sex for ages (no idea why) and I judged this sort of passable. Mostly for the Mello/His rosary scene. And I challenged myself by making it completely nonverbal. 'Quintessence' doesn't count, there's dialogue, sort of.  
Title comes from the song Seventy Times 7 by Brand New.

Your thoughts?

x0x0 Raven


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